OpenShift evangelist Steven Citron-Pousty recently published the first of a series of blog posts on geospatial applications. The series will focus on creating/downloading geospatial data, as well as various ways of hosting it back to the world. He included a list of useful concepts for getting started learning about this topic - here's a slice of what you'll get if you click through to the full post:

This will be a long post since there is a lot of ground to cover, but it is required reading for the rest of the series. If you don't feel like reading it all, here are the concepts you will need to learn: